Ștefan cel Mare

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Ștefan cel Mare, contemporary portrait, Vorone monasteryț
Monument Ștefans in Chișinău
Monument in Piatra Neamț

Ștefan III. cel Mare or Stefan the Great (* around 1433 in Borzeşti ; † July 2, 1504 in Suceava ) was a Moldovan voivode . Along with Mircea cel Bătrân , Iancu de Hunedoara and Michael the Brave, he was one of the most important rulers of the forerunner states of today's Romania , to whom Romanian nationality is ascribed today. Ștefan cel Mare is the central figure in the culture of remembranceof the Moldovan population and was used at all times and by different sides as a symbol for the respective identity politics .

Historical background of the rule of Ștefan cel Mare

In the 15th century, the Ottoman Empire consolidated itself , and through its rapid expansion in the 14th century it had become the most important power factor in Southeast Europe . The Second Bulgarian Empire came under direct Ottoman rule, the Serbian Empire , which was crumbling into partial rule, was increasingly controlled by the Ottomans , and the once powerful Byzantine Empire was essentially limited to the city of Constantinople in the decades before its final fall in 1453 . The southeastern Balkan Peninsula was thus the center of the Ottoman Empire. In addition, the Kingdom of Hungary and the Kingdom of Poland were the two adversaries who also wanted access to south-eastern Europe. In between were some small-scale areas that were under Ottoman influence but not directly under Ottoman rule, such as Wallachia and Moldova . After military submission, these areas could either be integrated directly into the empire or voluntarily submit to the sultan and thus retain a relative autonomy under Ottoman suzerainty.

The principality of Moldova , which borders on the Ottoman rule , came into the catchment area of ​​the Sublime Gate in the 15th century . The Vlachian (Romanian) military commanders who controlled the trade route from Lviv, Poland to the Black Sea , tried to evade Hungarian influence. Hungary and Poland tried again and again to control the Principality of Moldova and cleverly used the power struggles of the boyars . In view of the military strength of the Ottomans, the Moldovan princes recognized Ottoman rule around the middle of the 15th century and agreed to pay tribute to the Sultan. In this phase, the young Stefan of the Bogdaneşti dynasty became a Moldovan prince in 1457.

Reign of Ștefans

With the help of the Wallachian voivode Vlad III. Drăculea, Stefan ascended the throne of the Principality of Moldova in 1457 . Stefan had a long quarrel with his Hungarian neighbors, who were hosting his predecessor Petru Aron (the murderer of his father Bogdan Voivod) in the Szeklerland , Transylvania . He vehemently demanded its extradition. However, the Hungarians used Petru Aron as leverage against Stefan by threatening his reinstatement on the throne of Moldova. As a result, Stefan attacked his Hungarian neighbors several times and conquered the fortresses Cetatea Albă and Chilia , which had been under Hungarian rule since the time of Johann Hunyadi . When the Hungarians marched into the Moldau in 1467 with 40,000 men under King Matthias Corvinus , Stefan defeated them in the Battle of Baia ; the Hungarian king himself narrowly escaped, seriously injured. In return, Stefan led a punitive expedition to Hungary and returned with rich booty. In the following years the relationship between the two monarchs normalized.

1471–1474 Stefan invaded Wallachia several times in order to free it from the Ottoman sphere of influence. This did not succeed, however, because the voivodes employed could not withstand the Ottoman pressure. The strong Ottoman garrison in the city of Giurgiu was only 6-8 riding hours away from Bucharest . To put an end to the repeated attacks from the north, Sultan Mehmed II ordered an attack on the Vltava in 1475, but Stefan defeated the approximately 120,000 invaders with his own army of only 40,000 at Vaslui . The Turkish chronicler Seaddedin spoke of an unprecedented defeat for the Ottomans. After this victory, Stefan tried to mobilize the European powers against the Ottomans, but without success.

The following year his army was defeated at Războieni . The Ottomans attacked under the personal leadership of the sultan with 150,000 soldiers. Stefan had only 20,000 to muster, as a large part of his army had to fight against the Tartars who had invaded the east . The Tatars could be defeated, but the army could no longer support Stefan against the Sultan in time. So the outcome of the battle was predictable. Even though he was clearly outnumbered, Stefan attacked the Ottomans. Despite their victory, the Ottomans had to withdraw again because they had supply problems. In addition, a plague epidemic broke out among the Ottomans. As was customary at the time, the Moldovans had devastated the temporarily abandoned land before the enemy approached, that is, poisoned wells, burned fields, etc. None of the goals that the Sultan had set himself before the campaign against Stefan could be achieved. The most important fortresses such as Neamț , Chilia , Cetatea Albă and Suceava were able to hold out. The defeat against the Ottomans had no consequences for Stefan.

Stefan's search in Europe for support against the Ottomans was unsuccessful, but for his decision to "cut off the Gentile's right hand", Pope Sixtus IV praised him as verus christianae fidei athleta ( true defender of the Christian faith ). But he received no help. After Stefan had to do not only with new Ottoman attacks (Cetatea Albă and Chilia fell to the Ottomans in 1484), but also with Poland's attacks on the independence of Moldova. However, Stefan received from Matthias Corvinus - as compensation for the failure of the Hungarians to help against the Turks and the loss of the two important bases Chilia and Cetatea Albă - possessions in Transylvania (including the castles Cetatea de Baltă and Ciceu ). In 1497 he fended off a Polish attack off Suceava and defeated the Poles in Codrul Cosminului . He then led a punitive expedition to shortly before Krakow and returned again with rich booty.

Disappointed by the lack of interest of the other European powers in continuing the fight against the Ottomans (Hungary had concluded a non-aggression pact with Istanbul, as did Poland), he finally concluded a treaty with Sultan Bayezid II in 1503 that preserved Moldova's independence, but with an annual treaty Tribute of 4,000 gold ducats had to be bought. Although Stefan's reign was marked by constant fighting, it also brought considerable cultural development. Stefan had no fewer than 44 churches and monasteries (" Moldauklöster ") as well as numerous fortresses built; some of them are now part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site . The prince was buried in the cemetery of Putna Monastery in 1504 .

He was succeeded by Bogdan III. cel Orb , his only surviving legitimate son and his co-regent since 1497.

Ștefan cel Mare in historiography

Ștefan cel Mare is revered as a national hero in both Romania and the Republic of Moldova and is therefore part of the cultural memory of the people in the Republic of Moldova as well as in Romania . He was voted the greatest Romanian of all time on the show Mari Români on Romanian television. Big celebrations also took place in Chișinău on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of his death in 2004 . This shows his outstanding position in today's culture of remembrance of the Romanian and Moldovan national movement and his stylization as a national hero .

The memory is detached from the individual and is “outsourced” to places of memory . A large number of churches and monasteries function as places of remembrance in the Republic of Moldova, since Ștefan was not only an important general, but also acted as a founder. His name is also associated with numerous fortresses that he built or had repaired during his 47-year reign. Since the Principality of Moldova was increasingly included in the Ottoman rule after his reign, later princes were no longer allowed to build fortresses, so that the name Ștefan cel Mare was associated with the heyday of the Principality of Moldova in later centuries. These mighty ruins were the brilliant counter-image that pointed to an earlier good order. The Moldovan population increasingly saw Ștefan cel Mare as the victorious Turkish fighter who, according to popular accounts, killed up to 100,000 Turks. In Dimitrie Cantemir's descriptions of the Vltava , the prince is also highly praised and portrayed as an ideal ruler. In the collective memory, Stefan was remembered less as a historical person than as an idealized figure onto whom the concrete problems of the individual could be projected.

In the second half of the 19th century, when the Kingdom of Romania was established with the help of the Western powers and an independent Romanian state emerged, a ruling figure and especially a Turkish fighter like Stefan the Great was particularly well suited to being used by the elite as part of propagation to be made usable for the nation state idea. In the schools, but also in public celebrations, in poems and works of art issued a hegemonic aspirations interpretation Stefans was spread the Great, the organization of a building on an ethno-national group nation state was intended. The new national elite legitimized their social position with the glorification of the past and presented themselves as the keeper in the course of the ages. The meaning of the symbol Ștefan cel Mare was determined by its struggle against foreign rule , the defense of one's own before the foreign , with now not only the Turks but also the Russians were identified to the stranger.

A corresponding reinterpretation of Stephen the Great also took place in the Republic of Moldova in the years after independence, when he became a symbol of the movement to unite Romania and Moldova . His monument in the center of Chișinău became the central place of remembrance , where protests and demonstrations gathered. The relocation of the statue of Stephen the Great and the renaming of many large boulevards and squares, which had been named after the revolutionary leader Lenin during the Soviet Union , after the new national hero Ștefan cel Mare was one of the symbolically most important victories of the pro-Romanian movement . Like no other symbol, Stefan the Great stood for the Pan-Romanian feeling of togetherness.

Another reinterpretation of Ștefan cel Mares took place by the Communist President Vladimir Voronin , who was in office from 2001 to 2009 . He made use of an identity politics based on the principle of equidistance between Russia and Romania in order to equip all ethnic and linguistic population groups of the Republic of Moldova with an independent collective identity . Stefan the Great was redesigned into a purely Moldovan hero by depriving him of his overall Romanian significance. Stefan, it was now officially said, was after all Prince of Moldova, and a Romanian state did not even exist at that time, but only came into being 350 years after his death. He also defended independence and was, so to speak, a champion for the independence of the Republic of Moldova. The Communist Party hoped to address the minorities as well as the Moldovan population with this symbol with positive connotations. The extent to which the initiative has been successful cannot be proven. It is interesting, however, how consciously the official bodies in Chișinău deal with Stefan's symbolism for the purpose of establishing the identity of a Moldovan nation: for example, his likeness can be found on the front of the current Moldovan banknotes . It becomes clear that Ștefan cel Mare was not only a late medieval prince, but is the central place of remembrance in the collective memory of the Moldovan nation.

literature

  • Edda Binder Iijima, Vasile Dumbrava (eds.): Stefan the Great - Prince of Moldau. Symbolic function and change in meaning of a medieval ruler . Leipziger Universitätsverlag, Leipzig 2005, ISBN 3-86583-039-0 .
  • William Crowther: The Politics of Ethno-National Mobilization. Nationalism and Reform in Soviet Moldova , in: The Russian Review , vol. 50, 1991, 2. pp. 183-202.
  • Dionisie Ghermani: Ştefan III. cel Mare , in: Biographical Lexicon on the History of Southeast Europe . Vol. 4. Munich 1981, pp. 178-180
  • Kilian Graf: The Transnistria Conflict. Product of late Soviet distribution struggles and disintegration conflict of the implied Soviet Union . Disserta-Verlag, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-942109-30-7 .
  • Charles King: The Moldovans. Romania, Russia and the Politics of Culture Studies of Nationalities . Stanford, ca.2000.

Web links

Commons : Ștefan cel Mare  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Daniel origin: Stefan the Great - medieval Turkish fighter under the sign of modern nationalism. (pdf, 139 kB) pp. 2–3 , accessed on January 10, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Daniel origin: Stefan the Great - medieval Turkish fighter under the sign of modern nationalism. (pdf, 139 kB) Lecture at the University of Vienna. October 21, 2005, p. 11 ff , accessed on January 10, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Ștefan cel Mare
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stefan the Great
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Voivode of the Principality of Moldova
DATE OF BIRTH around 1433
PLACE OF BIRTH Borzeşti
DATE OF DEATH July 2, 1504
Place of death Suceava